The skills that got you promoted are the same ones quietly strangling your team's potential.

Jayson Krause spent eight years as a funded national team bobsled athlete before discovering that the most important performance arena is not a track. It is the room where a senior leader decides whether to solve a problem or ask a question. Since 2010, he has worked with CEOs, founders, and senior executives across Canada and the US, and his message is consistent: curiosity is not a soft skill. It is an operational discipline with a measurable ROI.

This conversation goes directly at the habits, reward systems, and hidden costs that keep smart leaders stuck, and the framework for getting unstuck.

Key themes from this episode:

• The three triggers that bring leaders to coaching: the board mandate, the proactive edge-seeker, and the nightmare that wakes you up at 2 am. Mandated coaching rarely works. Pain is what actually creates space for real change.
• The Awareness, Intention, Experiment, Reflection (A-I-E-R) model: how to move from reaction to reflection before you blow it, borrowed from elite sport and applied directly to leadership behaviour.
• The seduction of solving: every time you answer a question your team could have answered themselves, you get a dopamine hit and they lose a development opportunity. The habit is well-intentioned and quietly destructive.
• Relational equity: your engagement problem is not a culture problem. It is a measurement problem. Jayson explains what to track instead.
• The meerkat story: a COO described by his team as the Grim Reaper rebuilt his entire reputation in six months through deliberate, specific work. This is what that actually looks like.
• What happens when you ask your team "What would make this the best year of your professional career?" and actually wait for the answer: most leaders have never asked it. Most teams have never been asked.

Chapters:

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:29 — Jayson's path: from national team athlete to executive coach
• 3:57 — Coaching without having been there: the asset nobody talks about
• 6:18 — The three triggers for coaching
• 9:32 — Why leaders default to tactics over self-awareness
• 11:56 — The question every leader needs to sit with
• 13:41 — "Subtle is significant": the bobsled lesson that changes how you run a team
• 19:01 — How values get weaponized — and what to do before it happens
• 22:14 — The AIER model: awareness, intention, experiment, reflection
• 27:35 — The dopamine trap: why you keep solving problems that aren't yours to solve
• 33:09 — The risk of certainty (and the illusion hiding inside it)
• 40:27 — The CFO who became the Grim Reaper — and then became a meerkat
• 49:05 — Relational equity: the only engagement metric that actually matters
• 54:29 — Joe's story: what happens when a leader refuses the narrative
• 1:03:15 — The skin-covered Petri dish: why the leader's culture is always ground zero
• 1:09:02 — Canada vs. the US: same humans, different appetite for investment
• 1:11:16 — Jayson's parting challenge

Connect with Jayson Krause: linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause

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Season one of Curious as Hell asked one question: What does it really mean to lead today? Over six conversations, a pattern kept emerging. The leaders who were doing it well weren't the most credentialed or the most certain. They were the ones who had stopped pretending they had all the answers.

In this final episode of Season 1, Tyler is joined by Meghan, a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the founder of Pebble, who steps in as co-host to help unpack what the season's guests were really saying. Together they work through three themes: Curiosity, Not Expertise; Relational and Co-Created; and Growth Through Reflection.

Part 1: Curiosity, Not Expertise

The guests who led best had learned, sometimes painfully, to stop leading from what they knew and start leading from what they were willing to find out. Tyler shares the 360 feedback that first cracked open his own leadership. Bobbie Racette talks about the tunnel vision of a startup founder who was moving one direction while the business quietly went another. Iggy Domagalski looks back at the opinions he confused for facts. Lara Murphy unpacks the real difference between asking for help and just delegating work.

Meghan brings the research lens: why do leaders cling to expertise even when it is clearly not working? Part of it is identity. When you got promoted because you were the best at something, letting go of that thing can feel like letting go of the reason you are in the room. What you have instead of expertise, she argues, is the people around you. That is the resource.

Part 2: Relational and Co-Created

Jennifer Lussier's team made "Vote for Jen" stickers when she was interviewing for the CEO role she had been filling as interim. That story, Tyler says, does not require an engagement survey to interpret. Meghan builds on it: the research keeps pointing to the same thing, that the relationship with your manager is the primary driver of whether someone stays, contributes, or quietly leaves. Jayson Krause calls it relational equity and argues that most organizations are measuring the wrong thing entirely.

Lara Murphy shares the moment her team told her to go prep for a big presentation instead of joining the call. She did not need to be in the room. The team had it. Tyler and Meghan argue that this is what letting go actually looks like in practice. And then the harder version: what do you do when your door is always open but no one ever walks through it? Meghan is direct: that is a cop-out. Leadership is not waiting for people to come to you. It means walking out of your own door first.

Part 3: Growth Through Reflection

This section starts with Iggy Domagalski and his think day: a few hours at Starbucks, phone off, handwritten notes, specific problems on paper. No laptop. Just tea and uninterrupted thinking time. Meghan connects it to the research on sustained high performance. The leaders who do not burn out tend to have what she calls an "other world," something completely separate from work that creates a flow state: a tango dancer, a clarinet player, a tractor on a rural property.

Bobbie Racette talks about what it took to stop being the victim of an acquisition and choose to learn from it instead. Three or four months of sitting with it before the reframe clicked. Tyler connects it to what Meghan's PhD research keeps returning to: the interior condition of the leader is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Jayson Krause closes it out with the AIER framework: a cycle that starts with awareness and moves through intention, experiment, and reflection. It is the operating system of a leader who is actually growing instead of just grinding.

This is the episode to start with if you have not listened yet. And it is the episode to come back to once you have.

Connect with Meghan Donahoe, PhD (ABD), founder of Pebble.